Accountability in your Organization?

Rumblr33

How are people held accountable for their actions in the places that you work? I have noticed in my company, employees are not really held accountable for their actions that impact the business. For instance, the Server team replaced no longer supported Windows servers with new servers and there were like 5 days of data that went missing and could not be recovered. How should these employees be held accountable for their actions? Thanks for the input.

White Wizard

Depends. If their action or lack there of impacted the client in a negative manner, such as no backups of a server, in my eyes that is grounds for termination especially if it impacted operations of the client.

If there is no accountability in the organization you work for, I would be concerned. Time to start questioning where you work, why you work there, and what on earth management is doing.

gespenstern

It depends. Large Fortune-500 enterprises with high salaries can fire you for breaking production SAP server connectivity for .25 seconds while upgrading VMware tools on it. Smaller companies with so-so salaries will tolerate a lot, because if they fire you, who's gonna come next to this position?

I personally prefer to work in high risk/high reward environments because I tend to fail pretty rarely.

Verities

Two words: Change management. Its how large companies schedule maintenance, track issues, and document changes to the environment. At my organization that means there is a ticket for any and all IT related work. If you work without a ticket, you are subject to the consequences, however if something goes wrong while you're working a ticket you are covered. After you finish troubleshooting the incident, you have to write up what went wrong and why. Its an effective system that also helps if you have SLAs with customers in case they want to know what went wrong (good for the company assuming its a software issue and not human error).

tpatt100

I am running into a lot of problems with unreliable/inconsistent change management. I complain and they send threatening emails, problems just pick up again a month later.

Rumblr33

tpatt100, I am right there with you. We have a change management process and meeting every week but the impact and details do not come out fully in the meeting and then when the change is implemented, system do not work properly. Sometimes there isn't even a change ticket in place and the change still occurs, and a ticket is created after the fact.

White Wizard, I am beginning to question the way the company is moving. I also question the sustainability of the technology that is being implemented and the decisions that are made for such technologies.

bpenn

I experience this daily. Server team alters the production environment outside of maintenance windows. Fortunately, new management "called" out anonymously the individuals doing it to the entire enterprise and it hasnt happened since. Management needs to step up and hold people accountable. Make them an example if it continues to happen.

White Wizard

Verities wrote: »

Two words: Change management. Its how large companies schedule maintenance, track issues, and document changes to the environment. At my organization that means there is a ticket for any and all IT related work. If you work without a ticket, you are subject to the consequences, however if something goes wrong while you're working a ticket you are covered. After you finish troubleshooting the incident, you have to write up what went wrong and why. Its an effective system that also helps if you have SLAs with customers in case they want to know what went wrong (good for the company assuming its a software issue and not human error).

Just because a company uses a piece of software to track tickets does not remove the techs/ company from all liability. Lets say I use connectwise, your saying its okay if I mess something up so long as its tracked? It is never okay to impede the workflow of a client, especially if that mistake was a result of negligence or inexperience.

Verities

White Wizard wrote: »

Just because a company uses a piece of software to track tickets does not remove the techs/ company from all liability. Lets say I use connectwise, your saying its okay if I mess something up so long as its tracked? It is never okay to impede the workflow of a client, especially if that mistake was a result of negligence or inexperience.

We have CM admins that approve work and scheduling of work. So yes we may have a ticketing system to track work but it is monitored. I think you need to go back and read what I wrote in my initial post.

In our environment, you need to schedule maintenance, put in a ticket, get it approved, do the work according to the ticket. If something goes wrong while you're working the ticket, you still have to troubleshoot the issue until resolution is achieved. However, it's different than doing some unapproved work because you see X system needs patching or a configuration change and then something goes wrong during the work, which means you could lose your job. Believe it or not patches, upgrades, and software can cause issues outside of human error. Which again, I said in my initial post. Even taking a solution from an engineering environment and putting into the production environment can cause issues upon implementation. I work in a large enterprise environment where an outage can affect 12k+ users or more, so believe me I understand system availability.

Some companies have to explain what occurred and having a documented library of changes that occur in the environment helps them understand what went wrong and if defined by your SLAs, must be given to a client (assuming you're in a service provider role).

pevangel

A lot of outages are usually due to bad or lack of policies, processes, and/or procedures. Whenever we have outages we always do an RCA to identify what happened, how it happened, and what changes or additions do we make to policies and processes to keep it from happening again. Solely blaming an individual doesn't do much to mitigate the chances of service outages in the future. I work for a Tier 2 ISP and I have not heard of anyone getting fired due to an outage including some pretty massive ones. People are usually terminated due to repeated violations of our policies.